Rotational grazing is a pasture management technique that divides a particular pasture into smaller paddocks for grazing of the pasture by livestock and horses in a controlled manner. It is known to use fencing systems for this purpose. The fencing systems must contain the animals' grazing activities to the defined area for a short amount of time, which keeps them from inflicting damage to the grass. Once a particular paddock has been appropriately grazed the animals are moved to another paddock which allows for the just grazed paddock to quickly and efficiently recover and be ready for the next grazing cycle.
Rotational grazing is beneficial to both the animal and the pasture. The animal does not have to graze down to the roots where there is lower nutritional value and/or higher concentrations of fructans (grass “sugars”) and where it may take in bacteria that may be harmful. Since the pasture is never over-grazed, the grass stays healthier and more efficiently produces the roughage that the animal needs. The result is a significant reduction in the acres of pasture required per animal and an improvement in the nutritional quality of the feed the pasture produces.
The more intense the pasture management, the shorter the grazing cycle will be and the more paddocks a pasture will require. This creates a need for fencing systems to accommodate the temporary containment of the animals into smaller areas and their movement between these areas. The use of a permanent fencing system for this type of pasture management will congest the field with a large maze of fencing and make it very difficult for the farmer or rancher to use tractors and implements for the conditioning and maintenance work he has to do to maintain the pasture. Permanent fencing systems would also severely restrict the manager's ability to respond to varying conditions within the pasture which may dictate the need to define grazing areas that do not fit the existing arrangement of the permanent fencing system.
The inventor herein envisions that the ideal system is a portable fencing system that can be quickly and easily set up to define a small grazing area and then removed and set up at another grazing area, used to make corridors for the efficient movement of animals, and used to otherwise manage the number and location of animals on the grazing areas. Such portable fencing system would give the pasture manager flexibility in providing for efficient grazing and recovery of the pasture. Thus, in order for rotational grazing to be optimized and labor intensity minimized, the portable fencing system needs to be quick and easy to set up, securely anchored to the ground so that it will stay in place, and require few or no tools to install and remove it.
An example of a prior art portable fencing system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,649,690 to Kilmer. The Kilmer system utilizes a plurality of portable fence post support assemblies each having a post for supporting a number of wires, a base member configured for placement lengthwise on the ground for supporting the post thereabove in an upright orientation, an angled brace attached to and extending between the post and base member, and a plurality of anchoring devices in the form of an auger and/or spikes mounted through and extending below the base and into the ground. While the Kilmer system appears to be a step in the right direction, it appears to fall far short of having the characteristics of an ideal portable fencing system as outlined above. The Kilmer fence post support assemblies seem rather bulky, cumbersome and awkward to handle and thus would not be likely to enable a user to be able to quickly and easily set up and take down such fencing system.
Consequently, a need exists for an innovation which will overcome the inadequacies of the prior art fencing systems and more nearly have the characteristics of an ideal portable fencing system as outlined above.